At this time of year many recent graduates will be wondering what to do with their hard-won degrees. While I cannot point them in the direction of specific vacancies, I can assure them that the world of wine needs many of their skills.

Scientists, you would not believe how many basic questions about wine remain unanswered. Although wine is treasured for its ability to age (better-quality wines are virtually the only consumables that can improve over years or decades) we know remarkably little about what actually happens as wine matures. It would be wonderful to put some graduate minds to work on this in order to work out exactly why some wines age so well and others don’t.

Another area for research by a combination of geologists and soil scientists is the much-discussed but undetermined relationship between rocks, soils and the grapes and then wines that result from them. Because there seem to be tasteable correlations between certain sorts of wines and the vineyards that produced them, tasters have liberally applied “rocky” terms to wines. Mosel Rieslings, often grown on vineyards littered with shards of slate, are sometimes described as “slaty”. For decades the wines of Pouilly-Fumé have been called “flinty” by English speakers, a reference to the flinty look of the silex soils found in vineyards there.